But the whole point is if you ruin thousands of terrestrial telescopes used (successfully) by thousands of researchers, and in exchange you get a promise of one day maybe having tons of orbital telescopes, you aren’t really addressing the concern.

Come on, you are arguing in such bad faith its ridiculous. Everyone knows space based telescopes are orders of magnitude better, and will be better for research than thousands of earth based telescopes.

Even the researches, unless very selfish, should know that ideally you want many more very powerful space based telescopes if you actually want to do research and not just marvel at the stars from your patio.

We obviously want larger launch capacity in the long run. It's not even a question. Falcon 9 is already the most successful rocket ever on almost all stats of usefulness, why shouldn't we have at least SOME faith that spacex will be able to build starship and use it?

> Everyone knows space based telescopes are orders of magnitude better, and will be better for research than thousands of earth based telescopes

Real terrestrial telescopes are better than hypothetical space-based ones.

And I didn’t say we don’t want more capacity nor that Falcon 9 isn’t the most successful rocket ever, nor that I don’t have faith in SpaceX’s ability to create Starship, nor that Starship won’t eventually add space-based telescopes.

I said that none of that actually addresses the current concerns of people who currently need to do their work, as GP implied their complaints are totally irrelevant because “someday we’ll launch more.”

It's a steam-liner in an age of sailing galleons, hopefully it will make an orbital ring (analogous to budget airlines) affordable.